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Saturday, June 07, 2014

THE REAL STORY IN UKRAINE

Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe

Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

NATO leaders are currently acting out a
deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain
between Russia and the West.With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events
they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered
are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian
aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an
aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to
react defensively, one way or another.They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin
would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating
political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent
on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence”
in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the
Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s
border.A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned
if he didn’t. He could underreact, and betray Russia’s basic national
interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal
attack position.Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine.
The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new
Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be
saved (again) by the generous Americans.In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle
course. Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans
felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously
bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic
solution was found. Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a
referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law,
although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then
in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s
duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent
militias. The change of status of Crimea was achieved without
bloodshed, by the ballot box.Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit
as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected
Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country
outright – which they may have expected him to do.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous
indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is
in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony
pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression
that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry
pontificated. “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”.
Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and
punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable
expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient
echo.It Was All Planned at Yalta In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor
Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future
that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt,
Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945. The
Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display
of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of
48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The
participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General
David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former
World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt,
Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s
influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Both President Viktor
Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected
successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary
Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which
the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking
for Russia’s natural gas reserves. The center of discussion was the
“Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine
and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with
the West. The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking
Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West.Conspiracy against Russia? Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the
proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a
large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named
Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear.Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference. Forbes
reported at the time on the “stark difference” between the Russian and
Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with
the EU but over its likely impact.” In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed
economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s
economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts
deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting
substantial increase in Western imports ccould only swell the deficit.
Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”.The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far
closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.”As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the
Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the
country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia
would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western
sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail
serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia
itself. Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders
decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong.
What went wrong first was that Yanukovych got cold feet faced with the
economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European
Union. He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of
this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests
ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against
Russia.Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles HeelUkraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly
fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and
too far to the West. The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but
the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a
unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its
neighbors.It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as
well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the
USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its
Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a
union among equal socialist republics. So long as the whole Soviet
Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter
too much.It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The
victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western
regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg or
Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the
Habsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian
sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to
neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided
nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile
fishing.The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past
five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU
that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians
that it was interested in joining the customs union.” Either Yanukovych
could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out
of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder. In any case, he was
never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own
role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game
of pitting greater powers against each other.It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far
seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the
divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a
solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic
ties with the Catholic West and with Russia. In short, Ukraine could be
a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been
precisely the Russian position. The Russian position has not been to
split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s
role as bridge. This would involve a degree of federalism, of local
government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local
governors selected not by election but by the central government in
Kiev. A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and
maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with
Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility,
preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.Plan A and Plan BU.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was
carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick
Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife
of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events
proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established
under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to
foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent
in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S.
multicultural virtue. Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there
as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion
dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called
“promoting democracy”). This investment is not “for oil”, or for any
immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical,
because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the
greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the
Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S.
ambassador, “Fuck the EU”. But the fuss over her bad language veiled
her bad intentions. The issue was who should take power away from the
elected president Viktor Yanukovych. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate.
Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or
the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but
“Yats”. And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string
US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity
policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored
government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little
electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage
the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely
excluded.Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install,
rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally
setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s
indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea.
Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move
to prevent this.But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy. If Russia failed
to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total
national disaster. On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most
likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main
objective. Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western
mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian
expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing
Czechoslovakia and Poland.Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political
confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly
succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist
produced by Western mass media. Suddenly, we are told that the
“freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian
expansionism”. Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store
under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead
to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United
States. But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold
War are having their revenge. Never mind “communism”; if, instead of
advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader
is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a
monster out of that. The United States needs an enemy to save the world
from.The Protection Racket ReturnsBut first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order
to “save Europe”, which is another way to say, in order to continue to
dominate Europe. Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that
Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of
its NATO allies. The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a
large measure of disaffection with the European Union. This
disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that
the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is
in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined
globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended. So has
the EU. With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and
mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than
the one Washington imposes. The extension of the EU to former Eastern
European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might
have been possible among the countries of the original Economic
Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states. Poland and
the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in
America – where many of their most influential leaders have been
educated and trained. Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist,
anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to
raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct
the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany,
and Russia.Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic
States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a
threat. Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic
hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to
achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard:
keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S.
world hegemony. The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S.
military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold
War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations
between Western Europe and Russia.Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe
by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while
at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own
territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine. This appears
designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at
home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the
Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the
artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on
“defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S.
is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new
U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for
Russia’s natural gas sales – stigmatized as a “way of exercising
political pressure”, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are
presumed to be innocent. Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria
and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that
would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.From D-Day to Dooms DayToday, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is
being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American
domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The
last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the
ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the
start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is
a charade. French television is awash with the tears of young
villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is
some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of
Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past
is implicitly projected on the future. In seventy years, the Cold War, a
dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced
the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that
won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately
shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue. The Russians are
paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi
occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has
forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the
Normandy landing, but by the Red Army. If the vast bulk of German
forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern
front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won
the first round of the Ukrainian crisis. He has no doubt done the best
he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him. But the U.S. has whole
ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess
game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The
United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian
leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the
servility of the “old” Europeans. Apparently abandoning all Europe’s
accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even
oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem
ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a
difference? All it would take would be for mass media to tell the
truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders,
for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to
begin to dawn.A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

Thursday, June 05, 2014

WE WERE LIED TO.....

Brock McIntosh interviewed from Washington, DC. He fought with Army National Guard in
Afghanistan from November 2008 to August 2009. McIntosh was based near where
Bowe Bergdahl was captured. McIntosh had later applied for conscientious
objector status and joined Iraq Veterans Against the War.

REFUGEE CRISIS BEGINS

Heavy artillery strikes on Eastern Ukraine have left the area on the
brink of a humanitarian crisis: activists say the water supply in
several cities in the region has been cut off. Tens of thousands of
people have fled their homes and crossed the border with Russia - where
temporary refugee camps have been set up. And even more are expected to
come, as Paula Slier has been finding out.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Bowe Bergdahl prepares for graduation from basic training near Fort Benning in Georgia.

Rolling Stone magazine has done a big story on Bergdahl. Below are some excerpts. You can see the full story here

On June 27, 2009, he sent what would be his final e-mail­ to his parents.
It was a lengthy message documenting his complete disillusionment with
the war effort. He opened it by addressing it simply to "mom, dad."

"The future is too good to waste on lies," Bowe wrote. "And life is
way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend
it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their
ideas and I am ashamed to even be american. The horror of the
self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

The e-mail went on to list a series of complaints: Three good
sergeants, Bowe said, had been forced to move to another company, and
"one of the biggest shit bags is being put in charge of the team." His
battalion commander was a "conceited old fool." The military system
itself was broken: "In the US army you are cut down for being honest...
but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to
do what ever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank... The
system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US
soldier is just the lie of fools." The soldiers he actually admired were
planning on leaving: "The US army is the biggest joke the world has to
laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The
few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling
us privates to do the same."

In the second-to-last paragraph of the e-mail, Bowe wrote about his
broader disgust with America's approach to the war – an effort, on the
ground, that seemed to represent the exact opposite of the kind of
concerted campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of average Afghans
envisioned by counterinsurgency strategists. "I am sorry for everything
here," Bowe told his parents. "These people need help, yet what they get
is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are
nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live."
He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative,
possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP.
"We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their
children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks... We make fun
of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not
understanding we are insulting them."

Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read
as a suicide note. "I am sorry for everything," he wrote. "The horror
that is america is disgusting." Then he signed off with a final message
to his mother and father. "There are a few more boxes coming to you
guys," he said, referring to his uniform and books, which he had already
packed up and shipped off. "Feel free to open them, and use them."

On June 27th, at 10:43 p.m., Bob Bergdahl responded to his son's
final message not long after he received it. His subject line was
titled: OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!

In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the
unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard
duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the
base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?

Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.

Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and
sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his
diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.

THIS ISSUE - LESLIE MANNING

The latest edition of This Issue
features Leslie Manning. Leslie is a Quaker and an active peace and social
justice person and a member of the new group in Bath called Midcoast Citizens
for Sustainable Economies. She talks about the need for
conversion/diversification of the military industrial complex in Maine and
invites the public to attend a forum on the subject that will be held on June
27. Leslie formerly served as deputy director of the Bureau of Labor Standards for Maine’s Department of Labor during
the previous administration.

Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had
been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists
and neo-Nazis played a prominent role. That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law
giving the French language official status, appointed a billionaire
oligarch to run Quebec and signed an association agreement with a
Russian-led trade bloc.Just imagine…. If Russia had spent $5 billion on regime change in Canada and then a
leading Canadian energy firm had appointed to its board of directors the
son of a top Russian government politician.

Subrata Ghoshroy is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ghoshroy had worked in the field of high-energy laser before he
turned defence analyst and whistleblower against faked ‘Star Wars’
missile defence tests by US weapons contractors. At MIT, a private
research university in the US city of Cambridge, he directs a project
to promote nuclear stability in South Asia. He says:

This vision of America – being a force for and doing good in the
world – is really believed by the people and policy makers. But in many
instances, or actually most instances, they are certainly doing the
opposite. They don’t understand different cultures, the peculiarities of
different societies and civilisations, so they see everything in this
American way. “Our democracy, our form of democracy, is the right one”
even though there are other civilisations that have lived for thousands
of years.

The collapse of one super power, the Soviet Union, marked the
beginning of the United States as a hyper power. Blind faith in
technology fuelled unilateralism, variously termed as humanitarian,
pre-emptive and regime change interventions. This hyper power is totally
defying the United Nations, it is totally against everything. That has
led to lawlessness in and out the country. “We don’t like the government
in Iraq. So let’s go change it.” But, I am optimistic that the
post-Cold War order may be coming to an end.

Diplomacy is about give and take. U.S. policy is not diplomacy in that
way. Yes, they have their diplomats who sit down across the table with
the people of Iran or wherever. But the moment that their plan is not
accepted, diplomacy is over. They will bomb. So they don’t care about
diplomacy in the original sense of the term where you negotiate for a
peaceful solution of give and take. Either, it’s my way or the highway.

Christopher R. Hill, former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was US Ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Macedonia, and Poland, a US special envoy for Kosovo, a negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, and the chief US negotiator with North Korea from 2005-2009, i.e. a big shot in the US imperial nomenklatura. Hill shows his frustration with Russia not submitting to the authority of corporate globalization:

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and ongoing intimidation of Ukraine appears to mean the end of a 25-year period whose hallmark was an effort to bring Russia into greater alignment with Euro-Atlantic goals and traditions. Now the question is: What comes next? .... [the] new world order held for almost 25 years. Except for Russia’s brief war with Georgia in August 2008 (a conflict generally seen as instigated by reckless Georgian leadership), Russia’s acquiescence and commitment to the “new world order,” however problematic, was one of the great accomplishments of the post-Cold War era. Even Russia’s reluctance to support concerted Western action, such as in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990’s, was based on arguments that could be heard in other European countries. Russian democracy certainly had its share of flaws, but that hardly made it unique among post-communist countries.... Americans do need to understand the challenge they are facing from a Russia that no longer seems interested in what the West has been offering for the last 25 years: special status with NATO, a privileged relationship with the European Union, and partnership in international diplomatic endeavor....The Ukraine crisis is really a Russian
crisis. Ukraine – whatever is eventually left of it – will increasingly
become a Western country. Russia is showing no sign that it will follow
suit.

US GIVES UKRAINE GREEN LIGHT TO KILL THEIR OWN CITIZENS

Top Pentagon official has praised the way the Ukrainian military is
dealing with anti-government forces. Assistant Defence Secretary Derek
Chollet is in Kiev - and he says he's impressed with the work being
done.

THE SYRIAN VOTE

With the opposition forces failing to unite, Syria is now turning into a
huge battleground. The country is ready to elect a new President. Over
9,000 polling stations have been set up for some 15 million eligible
voters. Despite the bloody civil conflict and threat of a wide spread
boycott, many still want their voices to be heard. RT's Maria Finoshina
has more

PRISONER OF WAR

We are all in some way prisoners of endless war......

Bowe Bergdahl, the last known American prisoner of war in Afghanistan,
has been freed in a prison swap with the Taliban five years after his
capture. Bergdahl was captured after reportedly walking off his base
unarmed. He was said to have left a note claiming he had become
disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in
Afghanistan, and was leaving to start a new life.

Bergdahl’s parents,
Bob and Jani, had first revealed their son was the subject of prisoner
swap negotiations three years ago when U.S.-Taliban talks broke down. In
the lead-up to his son’s release, Bob Bergdahl spoke to The Guardian’s
Sean Smith in an exclusive interview filmed around the Idaho countryside
where the family lives. "I don’t think anybody can relate to the
prisoners in Guantánamo more than our family, because it’s the same
thing," Bob Bergdahl told Smith. "How could we have such a high standard
of judicial process for horrible war criminals [during World War II]
... and yet now we can go for 10-11 years without even having judicial
process? It’s just wrong."

NATO CONTINUES WAR PREPARATIONS AGAINST RUSSIA

US-NATO call it 'collective defense'. I call it provocative and destabilizing offense.

NATO also uses the word 'inter-operability' which means all NATO countries buy weapons from the US military industrial complex and run them through the enormous Pentagon space warfare satellite system. That ensures the US military controls everything but the bonus is they get the NATO member states to help pay for it.

US-NATO see their alliance as the global military arm of corporate capitalism. It's the substitute for the United Nations which has that sticky and uncontrollable General Assembly where all the nations of the world have their chance to speak. And that pain-in-the-ass Security Council where Russia and China can veto any motion to support attacks by the US and its war happy allies.

NATO clears all that away. The US controls NATO and gets no push back from the 'members'. What the US wants they get.

The US-NATO (appointed, approved, armed, directed, funded, propped-up, controlled) government in Kiev is stepping up air attacks on eastern Ukraine. The video below shows the aftermath from yesterday's bombing of Lugansk
City Administration Building in the center of Lugansk by a single
Ukrainian Air Force Sukhoi ground attack airplane. The building is
the titular headquarters of Donbas Republic but 95% of the offices and
workers in that building are city administration workers, civilians
doing their work for the citizens of Lugansk and most of whom have
worked there for years.

The US-NATO know that by killing civilians in eastern Ukraine they put enormous pressure on Russia to respond. The NATO trap is being set and if Russia moves to protect the people in the east, just a few miles from the Russian border, then the stage will be set for all out war.

GROWING PROBLEM OF SPACE JUNK

Tens of thousands of pieces of space debris are circling our planet at
high speed, threatening to strike satellites and bring down the
International Space Station. And some American experts even warn that in
just 50 years time we might not be able to fly into space at all.

Sunday, June 01, 2014

FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE

The Truthseeker production folks called last week and invited me to do an interview for this weekend's edition of their show. The topic is US-NATO 'Full Spectrum Dominance'.

Chicago friend Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO is also on the show. I have so much respect for his intellect and honesty. He must have a photographic mind - I've seen few that can remember the loads of stuff that he does.